


For What it's Worth

by throttlegainwell



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: HYDRA Trash Party, Hurt Bucky Barnes, Hurt No Comfort, Hurt Steve Rogers, M/M, Multi, Protective Bucky Barnes, Protective Steve Rogers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-28
Updated: 2017-07-28
Packaged: 2018-12-08 04:16:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11638725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/throttlegainwell/pseuds/throttlegainwell
Summary: When he found the safehouse, after it had been scoured for evidence, he’d personally taken it down to studs. He recognized the room from the tape.What he hadn’t recognized so far was any of the men from the tape. None of them had surfaced, none had been so involved in Project Insight that they hadn’t run for the hills when defeat was on the air. And he knew their faces. He knew them. He knew their ugly jeering voices and their obnoxious laughs and their appendectomy scars and at this point he might even recognize their dicks at a urinal.He’d know them the second he saw them. If he saw them. Part of him hoped that Bucky wouldn’t, but Bucky seemed to remember a lot more than he claimed, so it seemed a stretch too far.As he rather violently found out seven months later, on a side street in Prague at two thirty-three in the morning, it was.





	For What it's Worth

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally posted [on the HTP kink meme](http://hydratrashmeme.dreamwidth.org/1504.html?thread=1852128#cmt1852128). I had wanted to explore the recovery themes before I considered it complete, but life got in the way. There is very little, if any, comfort in this; certainly not enough to be able to fairly tag it as hurt/comfort. It's honestly mostly hurt. While there exists a possibility that I may revisit it to give them the comfort that I very much want to show, at the moment it stands on its own.
> 
> This story is **incredibly graphic** and involves explicit, disturbing violence, some of which is sexual in nature. There are more specific warnings in the end notes, but this is a deeply upsetting story that I would advise you not to read if there is a potential for these themes to harm you. My guess is you already know whether this is something you're interested in reading or not. Upfront, though, I want to specifically warn for offensive racist and homophobic language used by the perpetrators.

Steve vomited for five straight minutes when he watched the tape. The first time, that is. He’d had to watch it again, and again, trying to pick over background details, recognize perpetrators, listen for accents and watch for, God help them all, identifying marks. The tape was information, a lot of it quite useful, a bunch of guys shooting the shit with their guard down, bitching about work and smoking cigarettes and drinking beers. Bonding, the kind of thing you’d do after work.  
  
But most people didn’t put those cigarettes out on the person struggling below them and they didn’t pour their beer over his face until he cracked a rib coughing. The bitching, at least, was intel, guys with very sensitive jobs and a sense of discretion that loosened with their belts. So it was important not to mute it just as much as he couldn’t look away because he’d miss some small thing that turned out to be helpful. It was important not to mute the begging and sobbing and pained wheezes because Fuckwit Creep #6 with his pants open since he’d walked onscreen spent a solid eighty seconds complaining about how the new safehouse was in a neighborhood full of “fuckin’ 'spics and welfare queens” so how safe could it be? And not a decent bar for miles. Fuckwit Creep #2 chimed in that at least it was in a drier climate; the last place had seriously fucked with his tree pollen allergy. Everyone took turns making fun of the “delicate fuckin’ flower”, asking “who let this asshole in?” and he took the ribbing good-naturedly, but maybe that had a hand in why when it was his turn “at bat”, they said, he really did bring a fucking bat.  
  
He swallowed the bile the second time and the times after he just had to live with. Once it was burned into his brain, anyway, what did a couple more times matter?  
  
When he found the safehouse, after it had been scoured for evidence, he’d personally taken it down to studs. He recognized the room from the tape.  
  
What he hadn’t recognized so far was any of the men from the tape. None of them had surfaced, none had been so involved in Project Insight that they hadn’t run for the hills when defeat was on the air. And he knew their faces. He knew them. He knew their ugly jeering voices and their obnoxious laughs and their appendectomy scars and at this point he might even recognize their dicks at a urinal.  
  
He’d know them the second he saw them. If he saw them. Part of him hoped that Bucky wouldn’t, but Bucky seemed to remember a lot more than he claimed, so it seemed a stretch too far.  
  
As he rather violently found out seven months later, on a side street in Prague at two thirty-three in the morning, it was. 

* * *

 

The mission was a complete fucking bust already and they weren’t even out of the intel gathering stage. It wasn’t going to work. What had started out as tying up loose ends had quickly turned into a wild goose chase involving HYDRA’s highly experimental Latent Development program, which meant human test subjects and it meant mutations and it meant a lot of bodies piling up. Bucky had no problem dropping his vendetta – that score would never be settled – to do something that might stand a chance of saving someone, anyone, from their guilty clutches. But they were in the wrong fucking place and every day they dicked around here was another day HYDRA had to set up their recently-moved lab and renew their efforts. The lead was bad. Wherever the tip had come in from, the guy had lied. There was nothing left to see here except the smoking rubber smudges where HYDRA had beat it out of here fast.  
  
He had to hand it to them, he thought wryly. He’d never known HYDRA to haul ass anywhere before. They were learning.  
  
He’d never known Steve to dawdle even about mundane things, let alone when lives were at stake, so he couldn’t figure out why Steve had insisted on following the lead to its inevitable disastrous conclusion. The meetup with their insider had fallen through. The evil lair was empty. The locals weren’t talking. And all the stakeouts in the world on known sleaze hangouts wouldn’t do any good when the well had run dry and everyone had left town like rats out of a burning building.  
  
Needless to say, he and Steve weren’t speaking right now.  
  
His ears ached from listening through headphones all night to the muffled club noises picked up on the equipment and through Sam’s microphone. He and Steve were too recognizable to this crowd and had to work behind the scenes, at least until there was something actionable. Sam was a nice fresh face who probably no one remembered from the one time he’d really made waves: the sinking of Project Insight. Steve had had his doubts, but Sam had gently set him straight by pointing out the obvious in that way he had of being difficult to argue with. “They can hire themselves a couple of Nubian goons and pretend for a few years that they aren’t Nazis,” he’d said, “but I can guarantee you we still all look alike to their nasty-ass warped brains.” And so far he’d been right, which was a mixed blessing in that it was convenient but faintly nauseating logic.  
  
Sam was meeting up with Natasha just outside of the city in the opposite direction; they’d exchange new information and after that ten seconds of  _fucked if I know_  were up, they’d get some sleep and regroup. Steve and Bucky were going to see if maybe their snitch was dead before they called it a night. And after they’d slept off their going on seventy hours with no sleep hangover and the exhaustion that came from waiting around and not acting, then Bucky would see about bodily throwing Steve in the right direction.   
  
That was the plan, anyway. Halfway to the shithole their guy was calling an apartment Bucky spotted the tail. Not a huge deal – they could both shake those easy as breathing – and not even all that surprising for all of the poking around they’d been doing. But they had lots of enemies, and there was no guarantee who had taken an interest. Bucky went to elbow Steve in the side, but he was already staring at something else across the street.  
  
Bucky squinted. Yep, sure enough, another tagalong. And while the city was hardly deserted and sleeping, it was still too late at night for there to be much of a crowd to slip into.  
  
New plan.  
  
Bucky tapped the side of Steve’s foot with his own and gestured very visibly to the alley to his right while biting his lip. Steve shrugged, message received.  
  
They inched over to the mouth of the alley, then called over the guy trailing them pretending to ask for directions. He looked surprised, then annoyed, but probably not half as annoyed as he’d be when he woke up with a pounding headache after being knocked out by a super-soldier.  
  
They ran as quickly as they could into the alley behind them instead and kept going, sneaking through side streets that grew smaller and danker, until they’d backtracked half a mile and finally emerged onto a surprisingly well-lit street. Bucky was already calculating new directions in his head when he noticed, scanning the street, a man in dark jeans and a black tee shirt smoking a cigarette in front of a club. Totally ignoring them.  
  
It wouldn’t be a problem, ordinarily, except that he recognized the guy. And was sure to be recognized in return. He grabbed Steve’s arm and tried to usher him down another street, but Steve was frozen in place, torn between staring furiously where Bucky had been looking and casting Bucky imploring looks wanting him to explain. Well, fuck that. Bad enough that the fear dripping down his spine had shown on his face well enough for Steve to catch on in an instant and already despise the guy. No fucking way he was telling Steve  _why_  he’d rather puke up his spleen than be recognized by that slug.  
  
And that would have been that, they could have dealt with it later, but for the sudden sting in the back of his thigh. He reached down quickly, but as his hand moved, he could have sworn it wasn’t responding to his commands.   
  
His fingers had just barely grazed the dart in his leg when he collapsed. He listened, before the lights dimmed completely and the cotton in his head muffled all the sounds, for the tell-tale second thunk of Steve’s body hitting the ground.   
  
He passed out before he could hear it.

* * *

 

Bucky woke up with a pair of underwear in his mouth. The fact that he recognized it so quickly for what it was, instead of any old rag, was one of those private shames that would never see the light of day. A quick check assured him that they were not his underwear. He was still fully-clothed, though stripped of his weapons and anything useful. He wigged around a little to see if there was anything left that he could feel in his pockets and they’d even taken his granola bar. It took a few moments to be able to spit the underwear out of his mouth.  
  
“Hey, nothing personal,” someone was saying to his right. “We have orders. Anyone comes poking around like a fox in a hole, fuck him up. The fact that it’s you is a bonus.”  
  
“They left you behind just to menace?”  
  
That was Steve. Steve’s voice. He sounded angry, but not too hurt. Not enough to hear in his voice.  
  
Slap. One, then another.  
  
Bucky forced his eyes open, ignoring the spike of pain that shot through his temples. There was Steve.  
  
There was Steve naked and handcuffed on his knees in the middle of the floor. Next to a drain.  
  
No. No, what had he missed? This wasn’t happening. Fuck, please, no.  
  
“Ss … St … vvv …” His mumbling was so quiet that he didn’t think the goons heard him – although he wasn’t sure how many there were right now, damn it – but he knew damn well that Steve must have, and Steve, damn the bastard, continued to stare straight ahead at the man Bucky had recognized in the street.  
  
At Shankman.   
  
Bucky couldn’t help the phantom feeling of his lungs seizing up or the wild cough that followed, and Shankman turned to him. And smiled, a sickly-sweet thing that simultaneously made Bucky’s fists clench in anger and his balls shrink in terror. He thought about throwing a knife through the fucker’s eye and hearing the squishy thwack.  
  
It helped. But not enough to overtake the image of Steve on his knees, a sight so wrong that hell itself was probably imploding.  
  
“Nice of you to join us. I hear you go by Bucky now. You’ll always be sweetheart to me, though.”  
  
Bucky hastily looked at Steve, but he didn't look surprised, didn't react much at all to the familiar taunt.  
  
It took a while of frantic swallowing and sucking on his tongue to get enough spit back into his mouth to say anything coherent. Shankman smirked watching, and Bucky knew why, and hated it, but that Steve looked away with his mouth set tightly and a crease between his eyes was unexpected. “Why?” he managed, throat feeling like he’d swallowed fire.  
  
“Because Captain America gets special treatment, as he rightly should. And reunions are always a time to celebrate, don’t you think?”  
  
“Fuck you.”  
  
“Can’t. Made a deal, and I’m a man of my word. Your friend here already picked the short straw.” He paused, eyes lighting up. “Eight inches, that is.”  
  
Steve rolled his eyes. “Are we getting on with this?”  
  
Bucky couldn’t believe his ears. Maybe he’d been injured when he’d hit the ground and this was all a dream, or he was at least hearing it wrong. What the hell was Steve trying to hurry this along for? He must  _know_  what they wanted to do. He must know, somewhere in his thick skull, that he wasn’t prepared for that.  
  
“Leave him alone,” he tried to demand, aware that he sounded sluggish and pathetic even in his own head. “Leave him alone, don’t touch him, and I’ll play along.”  
  
“It’s almost boring how predictable they are,” one of the others piped up, sounding inexplicably disappointed. “I was hoping he’d enjoy the show.”  
  
Bucky growled in frustration. He started testing the manacles on his wrists and found that they’d deactivated his arm, probably with an EMP, which had triggered a locking mechanism. It was dead weight to him now, useless, throwing him off balance. He was useless.  
  
“Hey, hey, easy there,” said someone from the corner.   
  
Bucky jerked his head toward the voice and then he wished he hadn’t.  
  
Moss. Of course it was Moss.   
  
For a very, very brief moment that he would never admit to even under torture (and he’d proven that), he wanted to cry. Just for that one bright, burning moment of frustration clawing its way through his chest; just for the immutable knowledge of what was going to happen that he couldn’t stop, a nightmare from his top ten greatest hits suddenly skyrocketing to the number one spot because now it involved Steve. Featured him.  
  
Steve. Damn it. Steve had taken it upon himself to save Bucky.  
  
“I think our guest is a little anxious to get started,” Moss continued. “Wants to make sure we’re treating the Captain here right.”  
  
He was still as greasy, stubbly, and rat-eyed as he’d ever been, but when he smirked Bucky could see the gap he’d left when he’d kicked the bastard in the face way back when. He had a second of satisfaction to enjoy that before he realized that Moss had a long memory and steel-toed boots.  
  
Shankman shoved his fingers into Steve’s hair, mussing it up, almost playing with it, pulling the strands and twisting them this way and that. The muscles in Steve’s jaw moved. It looked like he was biting his tongue.  
  
It looked like he wanted to bite those fingers.  
  
That never went well, in Bucky’s experience.  
  
Shankman grabbed viciously at Steve to shove his face into his crotch and hold him there.   
  
Steve’s shoulders were rigid, his body taut, until suddenly they weren’t. He went limp. It was a punch to the gut for Bucky in a way that even seeing him posed in a tableau of submission hadn’t really sunk in. This was really happening. It was real. Steve was really going to let these monsters lay their hands on him, and all for Bucky’s sake, which wasn’t fucking worth it for a thousand reasons that he would explain if his chest weren’t caving in and if he knew that it would just make things worse.  
  
And for that tiny, sagging part of him that was … grateful, actually stupidly grateful to Steve, sharing the same space as the part that would never forgive him.  
  
“There we go,” Shankman cooed. He eased up, pulling Steve’s head back to look at him. There was a scratch on Steve’s forehead from being jammed into his belt. “It’s cozy, isn’t it?”  
  
Shankman was like a dog, Bucky remembered thinking. He wanted submission in the same way he’d like to go around putting everyone in their place and having everyone’s nose up his ass. All these bizarre pack instincts, physical demonstrations of power, that thing where he kept smelling his prey – ah, there was that sniff now, and Steve closing his eyes – and they all added up to the animal with his zipper between Steve’s teeth.  
  
Bucky blinked. He must have given Steve an order. And Bucky’d missed it, which meant that he was already blanking out. Fuck. No, no, no, he couldn’t – he couldn’t just – he couldn’t just float away and let this happen, just  _leave_  Steve there with these animals and not even have the guts to stay present.  
  
“Nice and slow. We got some precious cargo there, don’t we?”  
  
Steve looked unimpressed, but even Captain America had trouble being effective with his nose pressed to someone’s crotch. He got the zipper down and nosed the button open, then sat back on his heels and waited.  
  
Shankman waited, too. “Well?” he finally said.   
  
“You said to open your pants,” Steve said, voice cool and flat and giving no indication that he was bothered by this. Just hearing him you’d never know that he was naked and helpless. “I did that. Personally I learned how to open my own when I was a little boy, but I don’t judge others for their shortcomings and inabilities.”  
  
“Shortcomings?” His voice was angry and disbelieving and Bucky wanted to tell him that he should have seen this coming, that just because Steve complied didn’t mean that he was under control and they would get what they wanted.  
  
Oh, Steve.   
  
The sound of Moss’s boot striking Steve’s jaw was loud and ugly. Bucky flinched.   
  
Steve worked his jaw around, tongue peeking out at the corner of his mouth feeling for blood and finding plenty. He didn’t look up.  
  
“Take it out,” Shankman said, voice a threat and condescension at the same time, “and make it happy.”  
  
“I don’t know any good jokes except the one about the HYDRA agent who walks into a bar,” Steve replied, a hint of irritation lacing through. “You’ll have to settle for a blowjob.”  
  
Another kick, to the stomach this time.   
  
“Ooh, you kiss the president’s ass with that mouth, Cap?”  
  
“For fuck’s sake, Steve,” Bucky mumbled under his breath, and he heard Steve huff through his nose in response.   
  
Steve finally glanced in his direction, the most stubborn mule expression on his face Bucky’d ever seen, angry lines highlighted in blood.  
  
“You don’t know what this is, Steve,” he said, so quiet he almost couldn’t hear himself. “You don’t know.”  
  
Steve looked at the wall when he asked if he could have his hands free for this next part, or at least in front of him, but after thirty solid seconds of laughter he grunted and set about dragging down Shankman’s heavy jeans with the denim in his teeth. It was a lot of work and it was awkward and hard to keep your balance with your hands behind your back, and Bucky remembered the ache in his jaw from clenching his teeth down.  
  
“That’s enough,” Shankman said when they were halfway down his thighs, pushing them down a little further by himself. “I’ve been on duty for four days and I want to get going here.”  
  
“So you’ll be quick, then.”  
  
“You’ve got a real smart mouth. Be smarter if you only open it when you’re told. Like now.”  
  
His hand moved, and Bucky instinctively clenched his jaw against what he knew was coming, this opening move that Shankman never tired of, this assertion of control. Steve ducked his head away before he’d even reached for him, rolling his jaw. Shankman paused, looking down at Steve curiously.   
  
Steve pulled himself back into position and looked up, mouth opening slowly, but wide.  
  
Shankman dug his thumb into the juncture of his jaw anyway. Then he patted Steve’s cheek. “You stay just like that. Keep it open.” He nodded to someone behind Steve, someone new Bucky didn’t recognize.   
  
The new guy kicked Steve in the flank, hard.  
  
Steve grunted and almost shut his mouth out of reflex, but Shankman shoved four fingers in deep, pushing his head up and back. “I said open. You can’t take surprises, maybe you’re in the wrong business.”  
  
Bucky could hear Steve’s breathing, harsh and odd-sounding between the fingers in his throat. Shankman was obviously messing with him, pushing his fingers in and out to alternate between choking him and scratching his palate. Steve closed his eyes again, focusing on his breathing it looked like. Behind his back his nails were digging into his palms.  
  
New guy reached down, and with the angle of his body Bucky couldn’t see what he was doing, but judging by how Steve tried to jerk forward and away, then to the side when that pushed the fingers farther down his throat, Bucky was pretty sure he’d just shoved a couple of dry fingers into Steve.  
  
“No, no, you stay where I put you,” Shankman cooed, other hand going up to cup the back of Steve’s head, mockingly gentle compared to the hand abusing his mouth. It slid down, rubbing Steve’s face with his thumb, drawing it along his lips. He pulled his fingers free and wiped them on Steve’s cheek.   
  
Steve was clearly trying and failing not to cough, eyes watering, face red, nose wrinkled in distaste. He tried to shift on his knees, but the guy behind him clamped a hand down on his shoulder to push him back down and hold him in place, and he grimaced.   
  
There was still time before this got worse. There was still time. Bucky took a deep breath. “You’ve made your point. Why don’t we do this the right way now. You get your fill of the Winter Soldier, you go back and tell your superiors and they give you a raise.”  
  
New guy laughed and did something that made Steve’s whole body jolt. Yep, definitely Feely McFingers.   
  
“Bucky, shut up,” Steve bit out, voice wrecked already. “Just let me do this and shut  _up_ ,  _please_.”  
  
“It’s cute when they argue with each other,” Moss chimed in. “For a second. Then it gets annoying. Somebody gag him again.”  
  
Bucky struggled, kicked, and twisted around when someone approached him with a roll of tape, but he was still hazy from whatever they’d shot him up with and they got him in the end. He screamed in anger and frustration and it was muffled pitifully by the gag.  
  
Steve looked away.   
  
It pissed him off how much that hurt, but it did.  
  
Bucky slammed his head back into the wall, not half as hard as he wanted to, just to feel the energy buzzing through him course  _somewhere_.  
  
Steve jerked his head back around toward him, clearly thinking that they were going back on their deal, just in time to see Bucky do it again. His face fell, but it didn’t take long at all for him to recover and glare at Bucky. And he wasn’t wrong. Bucky wasn’t helping, was just making this worse. It wasn’t fair to Steve.  
  
But he  _couldn’t_  help. So what the fuck else was there? Wait patiently while they took turns torturing the only person left in the world who really mattered to him? Cheer them on, give them pointers, helpfully draw Xs over the healed breaks he knew about so they could crack them open again?  
  
Steve faced forward again, his eyes zeroing in on something.  
  
Must be that L-shaped scar on Shankman’s inner thigh, right by his groin. Bucky used to stare at it; every time he closed his eyes, they’d yank his head back, so he needed somewhere to focus.  
  
And Steve was focusing on it now, looking, for the first time, like he was going to be sick.  
  
“I would have assumed you were hard already,” he said, voice shaking slightly, “since people like you get off on violence and power and you’ve just made a big show of yours.”  
  
“That’s what you’re for,” Shankman said, annoyed. He glanced around at his cronies,  _can you believe this guy?_  plain as day. “You’re the most difficult pain in the ass I’ve ever had near my cock.”  
  
Steve cut another glance at Bucky, too quick for Bucky to see why. “You still retain the option of keeping your cock the hell away from me and the Soldier.”  
  
The whole room was quiet for a beat, then another, and then the laughter started, and Bucky knew just what was going to happen.  
  
Shankman gave himself a quick stroke, almost like he was just scratching his chin while he was thinking. He raised his eyebrows. “You know, you could be onto something.” He walked slowly behind Steve, then kicked him hard in the middle of his spine. He didn’t fall over right away, not until a second kick to the scapula got the message across.  
  
He fell on his face, unable to break his fall or roll to the side.   
  
Moss pressed his boot over the back of Steve’s neck. Steve had his face turned toward Bucky. There was blood pooling on the floor from his nose.  
  
“Kane, you squirrely shit, get out of the corner and give me a hand.”  
  
The bottom dropped out of Bucky’s stomach when he heard that name. He was so out of it, so focused on Steve and on the leaden, loose feelings in his body that he hadn’t even tried to look for the other players in the room. He couldn’t believe how lax he’d been.   
  
And  _that_  guy. That … God. There he was, oozing out of the shadow he’d been hanging back in, lean and tense.  
  
“He wants to skip ahead. We can accommodate that, right, fellas?”

Kane smiled, that same look on his face as he had whenever they’d ribbed him and called him a pussy.  
  
Bucky really, really hated that look. He  _knew_  that look.  
  
“Batter up,” Shankman said, laughing and pounding Kane on the back like they were both in on a good joke. Moss laughed, too.   
  
What a joke.  
  
Steve reacted violently, like he’d been shocked, kicking out and hitting New Guy in the calf, rolling his shoulders as if he could just break the cuffs – and now that Bucky really got a look at them, it was obvious that they weren’t going anywhere, not even for him.  
  
After a few kicks he stopped, breathing hard, eyes shut tight.  
  
“Oh, I think he needs it bad,” New Guy said. “Not surprised, ass that tight. Could barely get in there.”  
  
“You heard him,” Shankman said, looking down at Steve curiously.   
  
Steve was compliant again, lax under Moss’s boot now pressing him even harder into the floor. But the truly hateful look on his face, after the relative disinterest up ‘til now, seemed to take them aback.  
  
And then it sunk into resignation, and he closed his eyes again.  
  
“No, no, look up,” Kane said, tilting Steve’s chin up with his fingers. Steve flinched way from them before he caught himself. He squatted in front of Steve. “You know why they call me Homerun?”  
  
Steve swallowed hard, throat clicking. A muscle in his jaw jumped. And he glanced, again, at Bucky. “No. Why.”  
  
He stroked Steve’s side, lingering over the forming bruises. “It’s a good story.”  
  
“I’ll bet,” Steve whispered, barely audible. His eyes were bright.   
  
Bucky closed his eyes. He wouldn’t want Steve to see him like this, knowing what was about to happen. It was all he could offer Steve.  
  
And this time, no one cared that he’d closed them. He wasn’t the freshest meat anymore. That was Steve, bleeding and tender.   
  
That was Steve, and Bucky couldn't do a fucking thing.

* * *

 

He didn’t watch.  
  
As vicious as they’d been with Bucky when it had been his turn under them, they’d at least worked up to the remorseless brutality he’d eventually suffered. For Steve it seemed they wanted to cram it all into one night. Listening was its own kind of hell, made worse for the fact that Bucky’s imagination was full to bursting with enough nasty suggestions to tug at his guts and make him sick. Recognizing some of the sounds, hearing them mirror the echoes in his head, was a dissociating experience.   
  
He reflexively opened his eyes when the noise stopped, terrified, for one wild moment, that Steve was dead. He wasn’t. His chest was rising and falling unevenly, blood continued to pump through his body and seep through his skin in new places, and his eyes were open and clear. Bucky cringed at the condition he was in, wishing that he could impart to him one of the crucial bits of knowledge he’d found over the years: that it was okay to go away for a while, and it was even okay to pass out.  
  
Steve was fully here and he didn’t have to be. Bucky wouldn’t think less of him for it. The last time he’d chanced a glance at the scene unfolding before him Steve had been wearing down but steadfast, as if trying to maintain any sense of dignity with a baton up your ass was possible (hint: it wasn’t), but now he was holding on by the tips of his fingers, which, now that Bucky looked, he’d pretty much shredded. He was still digging his nails in, hard enough now to draw blood. They were raw and enflamed and Bucky stared hard at them to discourage a more thorough inventory because he couldn’t, he just couldn’t, sit here and catalogue Steve’s myriad injuries. He looked like hell. The specifics would come later, after they’d escaped, after they’d gotten the hell away from this place and back to some semblance of safety.  
  
There would be an after. There had to be.   
  
He looked around at the men whose lives he would end when this was all over. He should have killed them way back when. He knew that it was ridiculous, but part of him was convinced that he should have been able to foresee this and stop it from ever occurring in the first place, as if he could have known that one day he would be reunited with Steve and protecting him all over again. Or failing to.  
  
He could almost hear Steve’s voice in his head telling him  _You’re too hard on yourself, Buck._  
  
What he actually heard was faint wheezing and a rattling sound from Steve’s chest.  
  
At some point they’d recuffed his hands in front of him after all, so that he could hold himself up, but now he lay in a heap on the floor, not even trying to sit up, waiting for their next bright idea. All Bucky saw was purple and red and swathes of skin between .  
  
A booted foot nudged Steve’s sac from behind, startling him. “Up.”  
  
Steve struggled back up to his knees, pushing himself heavily off of the floor and riding out the coughing fit that followed.  
  
“Christ, you fellate a few foreign objects and suddenly you’re a pussy,” Moss said. “That’s not the Cap I played with when I was a kid.”  
  
While Steve’s mouth worked to form words, New Guy (whose name turned out to be Ross) pointed out, “I think his chest is fucked up. Solid work.”  
  
“If this is what you were doing to your dolls as a child,” he panted, voice strange from the swelling of his jaw and mouth, hands resting on his thighs, “I understand why you went into this line of work.”  
  
“They were action figures. And that’s nothing. You shoulda seen what my sister got up to with ‘em. Had Cap and Sergeant Barnes fucking day and night like faggots. I shoulda known she’d turn out queer.”  
  
The fact that he could say something that vile and hypocritical with his cock hanging out mere inches from Steve’s face was so absurd that Bucky thought Steve might just roll his eyes. Instead he just stared at Moss like he was from a different planet, exhaustion writ all across him.   
  
Kane was glaring at Steve from the sidelines with a bag of ice on his crotch. Steve had kicked him earlier while he was carrying on his signature speech about what he was going to do to Steve’s ass, how Steve was going to be his bitch, his slave, almost verbatim to the one he’d given Bucky. Steve claimed that it was a reflex, but Bucky thought that it was the speech. Kane had really lit into him after that, stopping only when New Guy had returned with the ice in a cooler full of beer.  
  
But apparently he didn’t feel he’d exacted enough retaliation yet.  
  
“You still got any of that back cream, Shank?” he asked.  
  
“I don’t think you want that on your junk.”  
  
“That’s not where I’m putting it. I think our friend could use it. Looks a little sore himself.”  
  
Steve looked wary and skeptical, wavering where he knelt, but he didn’t react except to roll his head back to look up at the ceiling and keep it there when Kane limped over and ran his foot down the length of his soft cock. Bucky didn’t have a clear view from his position, but he couldn’t imagine that it was anything but painful after the very focused beating he’d doled out.  
  
Shankman chuckled, rifling through a bag and coming back with a small tube and a pair of gloves. “That shit’s expensive.”  
  
“I think it’s worth it. I’ll buy you a new tube.”  
  
Bucky didn’t know what the big joke was here, but it couldn’t be anything good. Steve looked just as lost and unsure.  
  
Kane pulled on the gloves and unscrewed the cap, then picked up Steve’s cock with one hand and pointed the mouth of the tube down, past where Bucky could see, hidden behind Steve’s thigh.   
  
Bucky’s entire body jolted from shock as Steve screamed for the first time all night, drawn out and ugly and whining toward the end before he could suck in another breath and scream again.

What the fuck was in that tube?  
  
Steve panted, shaking, mouth moving but forming no more sounds as everyone laughed.  
  
“Gee, I’m really sorry. Here I thought I was helping. Maybe if I spread it around.” His arm moved, like he was jerking Steve off, and Steve started squirming, twisting to try and get away, held in place when Moss and New Guy grabbed him around the shoulders. Some part of Steve had to be aware, or else he would have been able to bodily force himself from their grip, but still, even though he fought, even though he couldn’t convince his body to stop moving and fidgeting, he allowed himself to be abused.  
  
Whatever it was they were doing now, Steve seemed just as shocked as Bucky. And he was. He thought he’d seen all their tricks, but they’d never done this to him.  
  
“Ever since that Bogota op,” Shankman said, turning around to face Bucky for the first time since this started, “you know, where you snapped and tried to rip my spine out, that one?”  
  
Bucky knew the one. He’d tried to escape and taken down eight Hydra agents before he’d been subdued. Shankman in particular had suffered a back injury that, last he’d heard, hadn’t been as bad as it looked.  
  
“Back was never quite right after that. This stuff, though?” He pointed to the tube dangling from Kane’s fingers. “Miracle stuff. Capsaicin. You know, I used to think holistic medicine was bullshit. Never woulda tried it if it weren’t for the number you did on me, Barnes.”  
  
_Capsaicin._  Oh, God. Oh, fuck.  _Steve._  No wonder he was screaming.  
  
Bucky stared with renewed focus at the sweat pouring down Steve’s back. The sting of that in so many open wounds had to be nothing compared to the burn of the ointment.  
  
Steve’s eyes were darting all over the place, this potential escape here, that one there, so clearly telegraphing his motives. His eyes skated over Bucky as he was frantically looking around and there were tears gathered at the corners.  
  
“Yep, this is the stuff that keeps me going,” he continued, walking around to Steve’s front. “How do you find it, Cap? Got a bit of a kick, I’ll give you that. Really does wonders for inflammation, though.”  
  
Steve’s teeth chattered. He kept swallowing, over and over. “We. We. We used to. Use poultices.”  
  
“Not such of a smartass now, huh?” He glanced down. “Careful with that. You get that up his ass and no one can fuck him. I didn’t spend three hours stretching him loose just to jerk off and go home.”  
  
Kane rolled his eyes and pulled his hand back from where he’d had it pretty deep between Steve’s legs. “S’not his ass. Taint one, nor the other.” He snorted at his joke, pulling off the gloves and tossing them to the side.  
  
Jesus, Bucky could smell it from here. It burned his sinuses.   
  
Shankman walked back around Steve, running his fingers through the mess of blood and sweat in Steve’s hair, tugging his head back. “Right about here, actually,” he said, almost to himself. Then he kicked Steve again right in the spine. Hard. Right where Bucky had injured him.  
  
There didn’t seem to be any air left in Steve’s lungs to make any sound. His body seemed to just shrink in on itself.  
  
His next kick wasn’t as vicious, just a practical nudge to shove Steve over. He just barely got his hands up in time to catch himself.  
  
“Finally,” Shankman said. He unceremoniously shoved his dick right in. After a couple of minutes he sighed and pulled out, like Steve was some great disappointment. “You really do give a hundred percent, don’t you? You could pass a baby through there.”  
  
He walked around and hauled Steve up by the shoulders, not enough to be kneeling, but just far enough off of the floor that he couldn’t support himself properly, leaving him hunched painfully. He dug his thumb into the juncture of his jaw, positioned himself, and waited.  
  
Bucky knew what that felt like, and he’d had many a fantasy, right at that moment, of snapping the man’s neck and walking out. Wishful thinking, but it helped. Despite knowing that the only way out was through, despite hoping that Steve would make this easier on himself … despite all of that, when Steve leaned forward and took the man’s filthy cock into his mouth, despite where it had just been, something inside Bucky went very cold and still.  
  
“Don’t know what you’re complaining about,” Moss said, taking up position behind Steve and pushing in. Steve didn’t even react. “I like it roomy.”  
  
That was the thing, though. It wasn’t roomy. It was still as ass. It just wasn’t going to expand beyond a certain point, and no matter what they said, it still always felt plenty damn tight to him. But maybe he was biased, since it was always his ass being reamed until it was so swollen he didn’t know how they fit anything in there. But it didn’t matter, because they’d always call him loose, tell him he was so open he’d never close back up, always take the opportunity to degrade him. He’d never thought of it like that until watching it happen to Steve, but in that moment, he just knew.   
  
Moss finished before Shankman, maybe because Shankman kept pulling out to rub his cock all over Steve’s face before shoving it back in, and New Guy stepped up to take his place. He didn’t shove in, though. He grabbed the empty beer bottle he’d been playing with and moved it between Steve’s legs.  
  
“Nice and cool, huh?” he said, moving it back and forth, nudging up behind Steve’s balls. “That good?”  
  
“The fuck do you care, Ross?” Kane spit. “We’re not gonna get him off. No one’s touching that thing.”  
  
Steve made a strange choking sound, so sudden and startling that even Shankman pulled back and out of his mouth. He made it again, and again, and Bucky suddenly realized that he was laughing.  
  
Jesus fuck, he was fucking  _laughing_.

 

 

 

Kane slapped him across the face. 

Steve spat out a mouthful of bloody saliva. “You did.”

“The fuck are you going on about about?”

“You touched it,” he gasped out. “How was it for you? Me, I thought your technique could use a little work.”

Everyone, including Bucky, stared at Steve for a solid ten seconds. None of them knew what to make of him. Bucky knew all too well.

Shankman knocked him flat onto his back and straddled his neck, leaning his crotch into his face and pulling his head up to meet him. He moved Steve’s mouth back and forth along his dick, again and again, viciously slamming in, and Bucky could see that Steve didn’t even try to breathe depending on the angle his head was at. New Guy had stopped playing with Steve and was now just idly shoving the wide end of the bottle into him, turning it this way and that to get it to fit, making Steve squirm again. The dumbass must have smeared the ointment all over the bottle. 

Oh, God, Steve.

And Steve … Steve was cradling his genitals, as if it would do any good, as if it could stop the burn or leave him less vulnerable. 

Bucky couldn’t look way, now that he’d opened his eyes, even after he’d promised himself that he wouldn’t do it. But it was just so pitiable a sight that he couldn’t help it. He felt like if he looked away, Steve would just disappear between them, and he couldn’t let that happen.

So he didn’t see when New Guy took out his cock and shoved in, but he definitely heard the pathetic whimpering and crying that followed.

“Jesus Christ,” Shankman groaned. “What did I tell you?”

New Guy was curled on his side in a fetal position, making wounded noises. 

“Get him some ice.”

Kane tossed New Guy a fresh bag of ice, none too gently.

“I fuckin’ warned you not to get it in his ass.”

“He spread his fuckin’ whore legs,” New Guy howled. “Bitch wanted it.”

 _Of course he did._  He already felt the burn; he knew just what would happen when that moronic goon got a taste.  _Two down_ , he couldn’t help thinking, smirking a little with a twisted sort of pride.

Shankman always took forever to finish, but Bucky could tell that he was close, even if he was subtle about it. It had taken a while to figure out when he was just about to go off, since nothing about him changed until the last second, and Bucky had gotten more than one stinging eyeful of come trying to learn his rhythms and habits. 

Just before he pulled out, though … Steve flinched, and shut his eyes tight, and tried to turn his head away. Just before he pulled out and sprayed all over Steve’s face. Steve didn’t even look surprised.

Shankman did. Bucky kind of was, too.

“Where’d you get it?” Shankman asked after a few seconds of panting. He lowered his weight so that he was sitting on Steve’s neck instead of over it, exerting pressure.

Steve didn’t answer, trying to turn his face this way and that to get the semen off of his eyes so he could open them. Shankman huffed an angry breath and grabbed Steve’s head in his hands, using his thumbs to pull Steve’s eyelids up. Steve blinked rapidly.

“Did you get hard watching it? Huh? You like this cock so much you know just what it can do? Before you even got a taste? This must be a dream come true for you, then. Did you come watching your little friend get rammed? Like watching him lick up his own sick little pool of spunk?” He forced Steve’s head to the side so he could look at Bucky, and Bucky didn’t understand until suddenly, looking at Steve’s miserable, angry, bizarrely indignant expression, he did.

Bile rose in the back of his throat, coating his tongue with no way to spit it out. The burn was welcome compared to the tearing in his chest that he was pretty sure was the tattered remains of his dignity. 

“It was sick,” Steve said finally, more emotion in his voice that he’d had in hours. “It was disgusting.  _You’re_  disgusting. Every second of that tape made me ill. You’re animals, and anyone party to this kind of … of … revolting filth should have the decency to die quietly and spare the rest of humanity the burden of their existence.”

“Strong words.”

“Sick minds,” Steve shot back. His chest heaved faster than before. 

So that was it, then. Steve had seen … Jesus, there was a  _tape_. They’d  _filmed_  him. He didn’t know that. And Steve had ended up with a copy, which made a certain kind of sense. And he’d watched it. Steve had an incredible memory, always had, remembered all kinds of odd, specific shit, stuff that no one else noticed, even before his transformation. But Bucky knew that there were some limits even to his extraordinary mind, which meant … which meant that to have anticipated everything he had, all of the preemptive flinches and the dark looks at jokes he shouldn’t have understood and the strange familiarity with Bucky’s tormentors … All of that meant that he’d watched it more than once. He’d studied it.

And he’d talked to Bucky, worked with him, shared a goddamn room with him … and never said a word. Never let on that he knew this awful secret that Bucky intended to take to his grave. He’d given no indication that anything had changed, and Bucky had had no idea that they had. But they had. God, they had, or this never would have happened, Steve would have let them leave this place and follow up on a real lead if he hadn’t been chasing after these assholes. 

And here Bucky thought that this would be harder on Steve if he knew. And he already did. 

That small, ugly hurt, the one that bloomed like humiliation when Steve said that they were all sick and disgusting … He knew that it was irrational. He knew that Steve wasn’t talking about him. But he’d been a part of that, and it felt like it was thrown in his direction. 

“This really puts a new spin on the whole situation, doesn’t it, boys?” Shankman crowed. “Here I thought Captain Right and Proper of the SS Tight-ass wouldn’t dream of this. And all along, he already does.”

He climbed off of Steve and grabbed the pair of gloves Kane had thrown to the side, pulling them back on. Within moments of kneeling down, he already had his fingers in Steve’s ass, prodding and searching.

He tried for a good fifteen minutes, poking at Steve’s prostate and having a go at his genitals, but nothing worked. Steve was just in too much pain to get even remotely hard, which earned him a round of laughter and a booted foot mashing his dick into his pubic bone.

Shankman laughed again when Steve’s hands reflexively went back to his injured penis, pulling them away by his wrists. “Don’t be so pathetic,” he said. “Maybe your little bitch will kiss it and make it better later.”

Steve lunged forward, using the grip Shankman had on his wrists to leverage himself up and grind his thumbs into the man’s eyes, rubbing his hands over his face.

He shrieked and threw himself away from Steve, who used the spectacle as a distraction, seizing the moment where the other men were focused on their leader to roll himself over to Shankman’s weapon and make a grab for it. 

It was unreal how terrible the odds were for them one moment, and the next, before anyone could react, Steve had shot everyone in the room. 

Shankman was still sputtering, blood pouring from his chest where he lay on the floor, when Steve leaned over him. “Orgasms make men lazy. Dull the reflexes. But the stupid was all on you. You brought that with you.” He shot him again, right between his red and teary eyes.

He sat still and quiet for a minute, not looking at Bucky, not looking at the carnage. Eventually he crawled over to their bags and rooted around until he came up with a travel bar of soap and a bottle of water and set about washing the capsaicin cream from his hands.

Of course. He hadn’t been cradling himself. He’d been arming himself, covering his bloody, irritated hands in that hell cream and then waiting until the right opportunity to use it. 

He scrubbed and rinsed for ten minutes, then tried to gingerly clean anywhere else the stuff had touched. Bucky tried to give him some privacy while he did that, sitting there awkwardly with tape over his mouth and his hands in shackles. In his peripheral, Steve’s shoulders sagged, sinking lower and lower until Steve just lay down on the floor and breathed shallow and slow.

The last thing that Bucky wanted to do was bother him, or, really, have to look him in the eye, if he was being honest, but he was seriously concerned about the urgency of Steve’s injuries and, also, he really fucking didn’t want to sit here shackled and helpless any longer. He rattled the chains just a bit, just enough to get Steve’s attention, and he could tell when Steve heard the clinking, but he still didn’t get up right away. When he moved, a minute or so later (a minute that felt like an eternity), it was just to reach into the nearest pocket and root around. When he came up empty, he rolled the corpse over to reach another pocket, then reached over to another body, moving himself no more than the bare minimum required. Despite having had to do the very same thing during the war, and having seen Steve do it, it made Bucky a little nauseous to watch. 

Finally Steve came up with the key and tossed it over to Bucky, then lay back down with his arms over his ribs.

The first thing that Bucky did after he unlocked himself and ripped the tape from his mouth was to spit out stomach acid and keep spitting until his mouth tasted less like pennies.

The second was follow the trail of blood around the room that led to Steve’s beaten body, trying to calculate how much was on the floor and how much was left in Steve. The math made him hurry faster to Steve’s side.

He intended to get Steve help and get out of there and deal with everything else later, but when he reached Steve and looked down at him … when he looked at him, he kept thinking about what Steve had said. About what he knew. Until Steve looked up at him, eyes hazy, covered in blood, sweat, and filth, surrounded by dead bodies that had not even an hour ago been live monsters. Just lying there like it was taking all of his effort to stay conscious.

“Later,” Bucky said. He put his hand on Steve’s forehead, ignoring what it came away with. “Rest. I’ll deal with this. You don’t need to do anything right now. Be here later.”

Steve closed his eyes, nodding absently, and Bucky would have been concerned by the speed at which he drifted off, but he was already fumbling a cell phone out of yet another pocket and calling Natasha, briefly darting upstairs to get a location. If he didn’t get the bleeding taken care of and Steve wasn’t seen by a doctor soon, it wouldn’t really much matter whether he was conscious or not, so why did he have to be?

Up close the bruising was horrifying. New Guy hadn’t been exaggerating. There was something wrong with his chest. How he’d managed to breathe, let alone speak, let alone do everything he’d done, that was a mystery. There was nothing that Bucky could do about that. He focused instead on the lacerations, the handful of burns, and the blood between his legs. There was a lot of it. It had sounded like they’d been going for distance, and that way led to perforated organs. 

Bucky palpated his abdomen, feeling for any unnatural firmness that might indicate internal bleeding, and he found it.

Goddamn it, Steve.

He did what triage he could, and when that turned out to not be much, he grabbed a towel from the bag, wetted it, and cleaned Steve up. Steve didn’t stir, losing color and breathing shallowly, forehead cool to the touch.

But not gone yet. 

When he was finished, he took off his jacket and laid it over Steve, then lay down beside him, trying gingerly to share his body heat without aggravating Steve’s injuries. He interlaced their fingers and waited for help to arrive.

* * *

 

Bucky set down the box of tea bags after the sixth time he’d read the back of the box. He dug the heels of his hands into his eyes and sighed, rubbing and pressing away the afterimages. He’d been pretty calm and kept it together, kept an even head, but after four hours in the waiting room he’d realized that information had ceased to penetrate his awareness: he picked up a magazine, set it down unread; tapped at his phone, ignored all of the messages; borrowed a book from Natasha, flipped to the end, handed it back. He still couldn’t tell you what kind of tea he’d been holding. He needed sleep. The adrenaline and terror and  _anger_  he’d been coasting on had dissipated not long after Steve had disappeared on a gurney with an anxious med team. No one wanted to be on the team that let Captain America die, so he got their apprehension, but it certainly wasn’t comforting.

He  _needed_  sleep. Three days with no sleep, hours of intense stress, and a lingering hangover from the fucking horse tranquilizers they’d shot him up with had taken their toll. Just holding his own hand in front of his face left him looking through a fuzzy corona.

He wasn’t trying to be strong and keep a brave face. He’d take sleep if he could get it, had tried to curl up awkwardly in the misshapen chair he was sitting in. But it just wasn’t happening. Something in him was still tuned up, wired and live and not relaxing even for micro-naps. He was damn good at catching a minute here, a minute there, with no one the wiser. If he had, he’d know.

He glanced down at his hands folded in his lap and noticed the blood crusted under his fingernails and staining the corners of his cuticles. Picking at it didn’t do much good. They’d need a good scrub. He couldn’t decide if it would be worse if it was Steve’s blood or if it belonged to any of the dead guys. It was probably Steve’s, besides.

He picked at it anyway, too tired to get up and find a sink.

The knees of his jeans had soaked through and dried stiff and brown hours ago. They still smelled like the blood and ejaculate he’d knelt in next to Steve, and so did the smears he’d tracked all over his clothes. What was really off-putting about it, though, was that his ass didn’t hurt. Not that he missed it, but … None of him really hurt, except his head and his flesh and blood wrist. It was just strange to reconcile the sense-memory of those smells, the feeling of being covered in flaking and dried bodily fluids, with the fact that they had nothing to do with him. It was only incidental that he was filthy. 

He flexed his fingers, first one hand, then the other. His metal arm responded sluggishly; he knew enough about it to poke at it just enough to get it working again, but not enough to really get it working smoothly. He’d need to get it looked at.

He closed his eyes and tipped his head back one more time, just for kicks, not really expecting much. He must have finally dozed off just briefly, though, because when he opened them again, there was a paper cup of coffee in his line of vision and his eyes had cleared enough to read the WARNING: Contents Hot print.

He took the cup and pressed it to his solar plexus, letting the heat bleed through his shirt and wake him up.

“She poured bourbon into that,” Sam said, settling into a chair across from Bucky with his own cup.

“I won’t tell if you don’t,” she replied, trying for coy and falling flat. She faltered a moment as she realized that her act hadn’t quite rung true. She shrugged. “I was out of whiskey.”

“And vodka’s cliché, right?” He took a deep pull, letting the coffee scald the roof of his mouth and gulping around the burn to let it settle into his chest. It was maybe more bourbon than coffee, actually. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “You weren’t kidding. What’s in yours?”

“What makes you think I’m getting liquored up?”

“There’s a bulge in your pocket and I don’t think you’re just happy to see me. Which bottle is that?”

Sam tugged a little plastic bottle out of his pocket and tossed it over to Bucky. Some kind of sweet cream liqueur with shamrocks on the label. He raised an eyebrow. 

Sam shrugged. “The coffee’s not great.”

Bucky tossed it back and snorted, settling further back into his chair and letting the cup rest on his sternum again and letting his eyelids droop shut. He drummed his fingers on the cup.

“He’ll be okay,” Sam said.

Bucky cracked one eye open to watch Sam blow on his coffee. “I know he will.”

Sam nodded once, mostly to himself. “Good. He’s going to be fine.”

Steve wasn’t going to be fine. If he hadn’t already known that when he’d woken up to Steve already in the process of being molested, he definitely understood that by the time he’d processed the anger and misery on Steve’s face when he’d admitted what he knew.

Fine was a pipedream. He’d settle for alive right now.

Bucky had cleaned Steve up to the best of his ability, but when Nat, Sam, and the support team had arrived the room had still smelled like fucking and on the floor were four men who’d died with their dicks out. It wasn’t hard to put two and two together. 

“They kicked the shit out of him.” He swallowed another mouthful of coffee, tongue tingling. “He still wouldn’t stop mouthing off.”

Natasha and Sam looked at each other fondly at that, as if that was Steve being Steve and they found it endearing, if irritating. Bucky wasn’t irritated by it. He was exhausted. He’d never blame Steve for anything that had happened, but watching him dig himself deeper, always a special hell with VIP seating reserved for Bucky Barnes, was a nightmare. And still.  _Still._  He couldn’t really fault him for slipping into his default mode. And if he hadn’t? If he’d just let it all happen and hadn’t made it harder for them? Bucky didn’t want to think about whether he would have looked at Steve differently, didn’t want to let himself think something so selfish and unfair. He’d known, since he’d gotten his mind back, that Steve would have reacted differently if he’d been in Bucky’s position, and now, having literally done so, he’d been just as Bucky had expected and feared.

He’d been telling himself for a year that Steve would have fought, would have mouthed off, wouldn’t have broken. Steve would have handled it better. Steve wouldn’t have allowed it in the first place.

And now it had happened, and he didn’t know how he felt about it, or if he had a right to any feelings at all. It was Steve’s burden now. He hated to think of it that way, but that was just how some things were. Some battles needed to be fought in your mind.

“If it had been either one of us,” he continued, staring somewhere over Sam’s shoulder at the wall, “we could have taken them. I could have taken them, Steve could’ve. Any time. But it was  _both_  of us. And somehow, we’re not stronger together. We made each other weak.”

“Don’t think about it like that,” Natasha said. “Steve would have protected anyone in your position. So would you.” After a small pause, she added, “So would we.”

“But it wasn’t you. And it does matter that it was me, because he  _wanted_  to take those guys down. Them specifically. And it had everything to do with what happened to me.”

Natasha tilted her head at him, reading him in an open, honest appraisal that was nothing like her tactical surveys. 

And Bucky realized. They didn’t  _know_. As far as they knew, Steve had been tortured and sexually assaulted in some way and Bucky had been forced to watch. That was it. They had no idea what this was about. The only ones who could fill in the blanks were dead or in surgery. Even Bucky hadn’t been holding as many pieces as he’d thought, convinced as he was that Steve was the one in the dark when it was him all along.

He’d never, ever considered talking about it before. He wasn’t particularly concerned about the shame and humiliation so much as the relevance. He couldn’t see a situation in which it would come up or be important enough to discuss. It was just one of many low points in his life, and not even the lowest.

“They were Hydra,” he explained, maybe unnecessarily. “They fucked me back in the day. Steve found out about it and didn’t share his intel.”

Which was a dressed up way of saying Steve had seen him swallow come with his nose pinched shut and hadn’t bothered to tell him. But he didn’t need to be crass and take it out on them.

The more he thought about it, the angrier he got that Steve hadn’t said anything. Anger was easy and livening. He held onto it. The more he focused on his indignation, the easier it was to push aside the shame that Steve had seen it at all.

Sam sat up straighter in his chair, like this admission actually changed things. Maybe it did for him. Honestly, he’d figured that they knew. These were people who’d seen a lot of shit and knew dysfunction. Just because he didn’t wallow in it and got on with his life didn’t mean that he was exactly hiding how damaged he was.

“He’s going to be pretty fucked up when the smoke clears,” he continued. “I don’t know where his head’ll be. There’s every reason to expect that he’ll find a way to make it all about me. I’m not gonna let him do that.”

“Where’s your head?”

“In a basement in Prague stuffed full of cotton.”

“Long as you’re honest about it.”

Bucky snorted and drained half of his coffee. It still burned, but he was more awake now, despite the liquor.

God, Steve. He still couldn’t quite believe this had happened, almost as though Steve’s image was superimposed over the memories already living in his head. Every blow had ricocheted through him like a physical thing, but at the end of the day, it hadn’t been. He was still in one piece; Steve was holding on by a thread. Underneath the anger, the indignation, the guilt, the numbness … there was that small part of him that was still horrifyingly, infuriatingly grateful, and proud of Steve, and full of love and some emotion he couldn’t name just at having someone care about him enough, love him enough, to go through that for him, even though he’d never in a million years have asked it of anyone. To know, beyond any doubt, that Steve would have taken his place in an instant, any time, just to spare him the pain.

He already knew that Steve felt that way, and he for Steve. But seeing it was different. Steve hadn’t just bled for him. It went deeper than that. 

Thanking him felt wrong, though, and wouldn’t really convey what he was thinking, anyway. He wasn’t sure that he could do it, or that Steve would even accept it. And he wasn’t thankful, exactly. But … still, there was something. He felt loved.  _That_  was something.

Natasha dropped a square of plastic into his lap. He fumbled it up with his still-clumsy metal fingers and peered at the tiny print declaring it an alcohol prep wipe. And promptly realized that he was still idly scraping the blood from his fingers, and she’d noticed.

He slipped his coffee between his thighs to hold it and tried more seriously to really get the blood out. Some of it came up. Plenty didn’t.

He was still scrubbing when a doctor finally came out to let them know that Steve was resting in a post-op room and she was optimistic. He didn’t even ask what all they’d had to fix. He just nodded a few times until she left.

A few minutes later a passing nurse, after a subtle double-take, offered to let him use the shower in one of the vacant patient rooms, stressing as they walked that she really shouldn’t, but she was a big history nerd and had a whole shelf of books devoted to the Howling Commandos and he was worth getting in a little trouble over. Bucky smiled at her as much as he was able and took the borrowed scrubs and plastic bag she handed him. 

He thought about throwing his clothes away, but the symbolism of the gesture seemed empty and useless and he was so practiced at getting blood out that he knew he could probably take care of them. He stuffed them into the bag.

His mind was blank as he scrubbed, so he turned the water up as hot as it would go, which wasn’t very hot it turned out. Still, it beat the lingering basement chill he hadn’t quite shaken. The plates in his hand were caked, but they soon rinsed off more easily than he’d expected, which was dumb, because he’d done this before. He knew how to clean his arm.

Maybe it just felt indelible. But it rinsed down the drain all the same.

It seemed like he was in there so long that by the time he came out they’d be ready for Steve to have visitors, but it was still another couple of hours yet.

Finally, around ten at night, Bucky walked over to Steve’s bed on the open unit and dropped heavily into the chair beside it. God, it was so weird, not even being twenty-four hours since things had been normal and he’d been about to read Steve the riot act for keeping them in Prague chasing ghosts.

Of course, things hadn’t been normal then either. He just hadn’t known about it.

It occurred to him that visiting hours were probably long since over, but no one said anything or acknowledged him much, or Natasha and Sam. He thought he caught a few glances, though, not at him but at Steve, much too speculative for his liking, and he had a sinking feeling what they were about.

Word was going to get around. Steve was a mess. Eventually, people would know that  _something_  had happened, and it would be fairly obvious what that something was. Even now, it was plain to him that Steve’s status as a national hero and living legend was complicating things. He wasn’t just some guy off the street. Captain America from your childhood cartoons and high school history textbooks getting raped was hard to wrap your head around, since most people forgot that underneath it all, he was still Steve.

He thought about what it was like to find out that Steve knew. He held onto that moment, pushed down the rolling wave of nausea and focused on it. It sucked, pretty much. He’d rather tell a thousand strangers all about it than let Steve down that way, have Steve see him brought so low.

He shook his head, combed his fingers through his damp hair. What a thing to think. He wasn’t letting Steve  _down_  just because he’d taken a few dicks and been degraded some. Or a lot. Why did it  _feel_  that way? Why did it feel like admitting that he couldn’t take care of himself? It wasn’t a mortal sin to not be able to protect yourself. Everyone had vulnerable moments. He certainly didn’t think Steve had let him down. It wasn’t their fault. He  _knew_  that.

But he’d  _been_  the protector. He’d been that for Steve. Bucky was the oldest in his family and didn’t have any older siblings to look up to, but he tried to imagine what that would be like, in Steve’s position. 

And Bucky’d already seen Steve’s ordeal. It was burned into his mind. With rumors leaking out and strangers knowing … that Bucky wasn’t sure about. It wasn’t like anyone who wasn’t a fucking evil henchman or megalomaniac knew about him. He had to deal with this thing hanging between him and Steve now, and then they’d just have to live with it. For Steve it would probably linger. He had no idea if people would turn it into something or not, but for all that he liked people, he didn’t have much faith in them these days.

He cut a glance at Steve. He looked smaller in that bed wrapped in a flimsy gown and thin blankets, almost like the little guy Bucky had known way back when, but with none of the fight in him. 

"Ah, Steve." He swallowed hard. "For what it's worth ... thanks for trying."

He scooted the chair closer to the bed, closed his eyes, and finally fell asleep to the beeping of the machines and the soft whoosh of Steve's breath.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Steve finds footage of a Hydra team violently sexually assaulting Bucky; he studies it to gather intel about the perpetrators in the hopes of finding them and bringing them to justice. Bucky and Steve are abducted by these men on a mission in Europe. Bucky is bound and unable to help either Steve or himself. Steve has struck a deal with these men to not touch Bucky in exchange for his compliance.  
> Warnings include but are not limited to: racial and homophobic slurs, humiliation, forced anal and oral digital and object penetration, forced fellatio and anal sex, physical abuse, and serious physical injury.


End file.
